Death of the Tiger - Ilankai Tamil Sangam

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escape attempt across the NandikadalLagoon, which separated the beachfrom the mainland. Images were releasedof his body lying at the feet ofArmy troops, a handkerchief over hisforehead to conceal a yawning wound.The Army claimed that it had crematedhis remains. Prabhakaran’s eldestchild, Charles Anthony, was killedthe day before, along with other fighterswho launched a final assault on Armylines. Soon after, the Army said it hadalso recovered the bodies of Prabhakaran’swife, their daughter, and theiryoungest child, a boy, all of them deadof gunshot wounds.Dozens of unarmed Tamils, includingseveral senior Tiger political leadersand their families, were also shot deadby soldiers as they walked out of the killzone carrying white flags. Their surrenderhad been personally approved bySri Lanka’s President, Mahinda Rajapaksa,after being negotiated over asatellite-phone link by the U.N.’s specialenvoy to Sri Lanka and Marie Colvin,a correspondent for the SundayTimes of London, whom the Tamilleaders had asked to be their intermediary.“This was not the chaos of battle,”Colvin said. “It was a negotiatedsurrender. Promises were made andthey were broken.”After the announcement of victory,there were fireworks in Colombo, thenation’s capital, and across Sinhalese SriLanka. In an address to Parliament onMay 19th, Rajapaksa declared a nationalholiday. “We have liberated thewhole country from L.T.T.E. terrorism,”he said. “Our intention was to savethe Tamil people from the cruel grip ofthe L.T.T.E. We all must now live asequals in this free country.”Rajapaksa is a veteran politicianwith a commanding physical presence,a trademark smile, and a folksy charisma,which his admirers liken to thatof the late Ronald Reagan. In officesince 2005, he seized on the mood ofnational euphoria that followed his warvictory to call an early election last January,in which he was duly reëlected toa new five-year term. Rajapaksa is theson of a well-known politician, but hisfamily comes from a village in the deepsouth of the country, rather than fromColombo’s Western-educated élite; inSri Lanka’s highly stratified society,they are considered nouveau-riche upstarts.He has made his rusticity a politicalasset, however, and he enjoys ahuge following among rural Sinhalese.One of his brothers, Gotabaya, is hisdefense minister; another, Basil, is hischief of staff and minister for economicdevelopment; and a third, Chamal, isSpeaker of Parliament. His twentyfour-year-oldson Namal was recentlyelected to Parliament, and forty-oddadditional brothers, sisters, cousins,nephews, nieces, and in-laws hold variousother government posts.After the war, Rajapaksa’s governmentadopted a posture of triumphalismat home and defensive resentment of theoutrage that the carnage had causedabroad. When the U.N. created an “accountabilitypanel,” government-sponsoredrioters mobbed its headquarters inColombo, forcing it to close. Sri Lanka’sHigh Commissioner in London complainedto me that his country was beingunfairly singled out: “Colombia has beencontaminating the world for years withits cocaine, and now Somalia is with itspiracy. What do we hear about that inthe U.N.? Nothing.” The important thing,he said, was that Sri Lanka had endedterrorism, making it the first country inthe modern age to have done so. In militarycircles around the world, the “SriLanka option” for counter-insurgencywas discussed with admiration. Its basic“I try to be royal without being regal.”tenets were: deny access to the media,the United Nations, and human-rightsgroups; isolate your opponents, and killthem as quickly as possible; and segregateand terrify the survivors—or,ideally, leave no witnesses at all.2. THE PASTIn 1914, Leonard Woolf ’s youngersister, Bella Sidney Woolf, publishedan illustrated guidebook titled “How toSee Ceylon.” Leonard, who had not yetmarried the novelist Virginia Stephen,worked in Ceylon as a colonial administrator,and Bella went to visit him beforesettling there herself. It was the Edwardianera of languorous travel by rail andrickshaw, croquet clubs, and afternoonteas attended by servants. Woolf wrote,“The stranger, looking down on themotley throng that threads the streets ofCeylon, is bewildered, puzzled. How ishe to distinguish between all these people?”She ventured a brief comparison ofthe island’s two main ethnicities: “TheTamil cooly, it must be conferred, is amuch more law abiding, peaceful personthan the Sinhalese. Apart from the hottemper which leads to the flashing out ofa knife and murder, there is an undercurrentof malice in village life.”Under the British, tensions festeredbetween the Sinhalese, who make upseventy-five per cent of the population,
A billboard of Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s President, who has a huge following among the country’s rural Sinhalese population.and the Tamils, with seventeen per cent.(There was also friction with other ethnicities;in 1915, Sinhalese mobs attackedthe island’s Muslim minority.) The Tamilswere seen as having unfairly benefittedfrom colonial rule; they held a disproportionatelyhigh number of civil-service jobsand university enrollments, and more ofthem were fluent in English. After Ceylongained its independence, in 1948,Sinhalese nationalists grew increasinglyinsistent that the Tamils were “invaders,”whose presence threatened the very existenceof the Sinhalese culture.The Sinhalese have traditionallylived in the south, with its lush land andancient reservoir-fed rice paddies. TheTamils lived in the arid scrublands of44 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 17, 2011the north, known as the Vanni, and thelowland jungles of the east, areas theirancestors had occupied two thousandyears ago, during wars of conquest wagedby Hindu kings from Tamil Nadu, thesouthernmost state of India. Sinhalesenationalists trace their lineage to Aryantribes of northern India, despite the lackof evidence to support the idea. Althoughintermarriage across languagebarriers was fairly common, especiallyamong the upper castes, Sinhalese politicsby the early twentieth century hadbecome infused with racialist theorieson “Aryanism” then being promulgatedin Europe. Anagarika Dharmapala, theleader of the Sinhalese Buddhist revivalmovement that began under British colonialrule, said, in a frequently quotedspeech, “This bright, beautiful islandwas made into a Paradise by the AryanSinhalese before its destruction wasbrought about by the barbaric vandals.. . . This ancient, historic, refinedpeople, under the diabolism of viciouspaganism, introduced by the British administrators,are now declining andslowly dying away.”The “vandals” Dharmapala referred towere the Tamils, of course, and the “viciouspaganism” their Hindu faith. By thetime of independence, the seeds of sectarianhatred had taken root. In 1948, Sinhalesenationalists introduced legislationto deny citizenship to hundreds of thousandsof so-called “Indian Tamils,” mostPANOS PICTURES
Page 3: organization that had controlled mu
Page 7 and 8: wicker chairs had been placed in a
Page 10: Rajapaksa governments never went on
Page 13 and 14: “And of course Allen continues hi
Page 15 and 16: BBC reporter that he should hang if

Death of the Tiger - Ilankai Tamil Sangam

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